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I had been informed by someone about his actions and behavior and did
not like it one bit.

I didn’t want to hear excuses or justifications.

I had been told by someone I trusted that my child had done something
uncharacteristic of him.

And because his behavior since turning 14 was that of some small stranger,
I believed them.

Believing this person was not a bad thing; the person was trustworthy,
and I had known them for quite a while.

The bad thing was not believing or listening to my child.

I didn’t give him an opportunity to tell his side of things.

He wasn’t even allowed the chance to defend himself.

Why did I do this?

Well, for starters, I am not a perfect parent by any means.

And, I was taking his behavior personally.

Over the last few months, there had been a shift in our dynamics as we
have butted heads in some heated disputes.

He has been moody, mouthy, and argumentative.

He has been withdrawn and opinionated when he was trying to engage in
conversation.

All traits I didn’t care for very much.

So, when someone told me he was misbehaving, I believed them because it
supported my own bias.

I was angry.

I was disappointed.

And I was not going to let him tell me what happened.

I took someone else’s words over his.

I am not saying we shouldn’t listen when someone tells us things about
our kids.

By acting like we have perfect little angels that do no wrong, we get
in a very dangerous dance that creates kids who think they can get away with everything
and sets them up for a life of entitlement.

But I do think we should also listen to our kids, especially when we
know they are inherently good ones.

A few days later, I had a meeting with one of my child’s teachers.

“He is a great kid,” she said when reviewing his notes.

Her genuine words resonated in my heart.

I repeated them.

Suddenly, hearing another person’s perspective reminded me of a fact I had
somehow forgotten.

“I am glad you said that,” I told her. “Since he’s turned 14, I feel
like I don’t know him.”

The other teachers in the room nodded. “It’s the age,” one said.

“Yes, it is the age,” another commented.

“So, this is normal?” I asked.

I had never been a 14-year-old boy before; I had been a 14-year-old
girl and couldn’t really remember what I was like. According to my Mama, I was pretty
horrid.

“It’s normal,” I was told.

I asked another friend who had two sons. She too assured me this was
normal, even thought it was not exactly my favorite phase.

“We did some obnoxious stuff when we were 14, too,” she assured me. “We
just don’t remember it. But I am quite sure we were just as bad. But boys will
come around. Believe me; they do. That heart they have is still there, it’s
just buried over hormones right now.”

His compassionate, kind heart was what I had always loved about my
child. It was what others had loved as well.

I was thinking about all of this as we went through a drive thru one evening.

“I owe you an apology,” I began. “I should have let you tell your side
of what happened. I am sorry.”

He looked at me and nodded. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. I was not being very fair to you. And I was over-reacting
just because I have taken some of your behavior personally. I should have heard
you out.”

“I just don’t understand why the person said that,” he began. “And
after thinking about it, the only thing I can think of, is she was just trying
to look out for me because she cares about me. So, maybe it made her a bit
overprotective. What do you think?”

I thought it was amazing that my child was looking for the positive in
the other person, instead of trying to cast blame or fault, or even justify
what he did.

He was looking at the heart of the other person.

For a fleeting moment, I saw that little tenderhearted boy flash before
my eyes again.

Suddenly I realized, he may not be perfect, and he will make mistakes;
that’s how he will learn. He may do some stupid things and get in trouble.
But deep down, he is a good kid and has a good heart. And I needed to remember
that a little bit more.

Instead, it feels more like people are
only listening long enough to catch an opportunity to talk about themselves.

I find myself telling people things –
important things – only for my words to be completely ignored.

Don’t even try to ask someone if they
were listening. Odds are, they won’t hear that question either.

Listening is important.

You can pick up some pretty important
information just from listening.

Case in point, a situation my child came
to me about recently.

“You may hear from my teacher,” he began.

That’s never good, I thought. My
experience had taught me teachers only called when something was wrong and
usually, it was when the wrong-doing was on my behalf.

Instead of jumping right in with my
questions, I decided this would be a good time to listen.

Mama always knew if she gave me the quiet
treatment long enough, I would spill what she needed to know.

I thought I’d give her tactic a whirl
instead of jumping in with my accusations and allegations.

“I made a zero on an assignment, but it
counts as a test grade,” he continued after my silence.

“But it wasn’t my fault.”

I nodded slowly.

“Do you want to hear why it wasn’t my
fault?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Well, my teacher told us we had to
grade our own assignments, but we had to do in pen. She told us we could not
use pencil.”

“OK.”
“I had picked up a pencil in my left hand and had a pen in the right,” he went
on. “It was just out of habit. Really. I always have a pencil that I am bouncing.
But she came by and picked up my test and gave me a zero. Just because I had a
pencil in my hand – and it is not even the hand I write with!”

Now, I could understand his
disappointment and frustration at getting the zero. I would have been devastated.

But that was not where his frustration
was coming from.

The first point of contention was the
teacher was one of his favorites.

She has known him most of his life and
in Cole’s opinion, knew he wouldn’t cheat.

His second issue – and the one he was
the most vocal about – was that she did not let him explain.

“I wasn’t using the pencil to grade my
assignment. I was just bouncing it. Like I said, it wasn’t even in the hand I write
with. It was not fair.”

“It didn’t have to be fair,” I said. “She
said not to use a pencil.”

“I wasn’t!” he argued. “You aren’t
listening to me. I had the pencil in my left hand – I am right handed! I couldn’t
change the answer with my left hand.”
“She didn’t know that,” I said.

“She would have known had she let me
explain.”

“She didn’t have to let you explain. She
said no pencil. You had a pencil. End of story.”

“Did you hear what I said? I said, I had
the pencil in my left hand. Not my right. I was not using it. Only bouncing it.”

“Did you hear what your teacher said?
She said no pencil. She is a teacher. Not a cop. Not a judge. She is not there
to hear your argument or for you to state your case. She told you if you used a
pencil, you got a zero. She walked by and saw a pencil in your hand. So, it
made sense to conclude you were going to use it. I don’t blame her and stand by
her zero.”

I think at that moment, I lost a lot of
mom points with my child.

I had always been the first to rush in with
the cavalry to defend and protect him.

I had always stood up for him.

But this time, I didn’t. Instead, I told
him the teacher was right.

I wasn’t going to call her, nor was I going
to email her, asking her to let him explain.

I was going to let him learn this hard
lesson.

He had heard his teacher say one thing –
not to grade the paper with a pen – and thought he could go do another, as long
as he wasn’t grading it.

Her instruction was implied.

It wasn’t spelled out explicitly, but it
was more of a subtle understanding: just don’t pick up a pencil, because it
will look like you are changing your answer.

And sometimes, those subtle understandings are the hardest to discern. Especially when we are only listening for what we want to hear.

Spoiler alert: the following may cause some to doubt the existence of a certain yearly visitor who travels by sleigh and eats all your cookies.

Now, you’ve been warned.

No one warned me, though.

But suddenly, there was no mention of Santa.

The potential threat of telling my child Santa knew when he was sleeping, when he was awake, when he’d been bad or good no longer carried the weight it once had.

Maybe I should have known when my child stated that was “creepy” one year that something was changing.

In his younger years, I had a list to give Santa before the Halloween candy was gone.

Once, he found the note in the floorboard of my car, where it had fallen out of my bag. He was maybe four at the time and worried if he would get presents or not.

“But you didn’t mail it,” he said forlornly. “How will Santa know what I want?”

“The magic of Christmas,” I said. “He knows already; he’s been watching, remember?”Cole accepted this as truth, thinking there was indeed a Santa-vision screen in the North Pole, keeping the jolly old elf up to date on what everyone wanted.

One year, he wrote his list and gave it
to the Santa on the square, not saying a word to anyone about what he wanted.

“What are we going to do?” I whispered to Lamar.

“I have no idea,” he said. “He said he was only telling the Big Guy what he wanted and no body else.”

When December 25th rolled around, Cole surveyed his loot and shook his head. “Santa’s slipping; he didn’t get anything I asked for.”

We never knew what the child requested, but
I think this may have been the beginning of the end.

“What happens to kids if they stop believing in Santa?” he asked randomly one summer.

It was 190 degrees and my hair was sweating. Why was my child worried about Christmas?

“They get underwear,” I told him.

“Oh,” was all he said.

A few days later, he brought the conversation back up. “So, you really get underwear if you stop believing in Santa?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He nodded, slowly, thinking this through. He was wrestling with a decision or a plot and didn’t like the outcome of either.

“I think I will believe a little bit more,” he said.

Christmas came and went, and he seemed to still enjoy the moments of suspended disbelief, but I wondered if it was true or just for my sake.

Was it selfish for me to want him to continue to believe a little bit longer?

For him to be caught up in the magic of Christmas and the hope that miracles can and do exist – was it wrong for me to want him to hold on to that?

“Do you still believe?” he asked me one day a couple of years later.

“In what?”

“Santa.”

The question had caught me off guard as it was yet again, no where near Christmas.

I thought sincerely about his question, knowing this was it. This was probably when he was giving up the world of make-believe.

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“You really believe in Santa?”

“Yeah.”

He eyed me cautiously. “They say Santa was a real person that went around throwing toys in the windows of poor peoples homes, so their children could have Christmas,” he said. “But he doesn’t do that now, does he?”

“Maybe not him personally,” I said,choosing my words carefully. “But maybe it is someone carrying on the tradition. And I believe in the hope and magic of the season, where people do good for other people. I think that is what Santa,or Saint Nick, was supposed to be about.”

He considered this for a moment.

“If I stop believing, am I going to get underwear this year?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

He nodded. And just like that, a few years ago, we shifted from talk of Santa to the practicality of present buying. Gone are the days of writing letters to Santa or leaving out milk and cookies, with carrots for the reindeer. It made me sad to think the days of magic and make-believe were behind us.

“What are you getting the baby for
Christmas?” Mama asked.
Even though he is 14, he is and will always be, the baby.

“He needs a computer,” I said. “And underwear. Lots and lots of underwear.”

That is one word to describe how I felt, yet it did not do the emotions rushing through my body justice.

I was wrought with outright fear and anxiety.

My child was not where he said he would be.

Or more succinctly, where I thought he would be.

When I last saw him, I asked him who was with him; he told me he was going one place, so I thought he was with his friends.

When I went to round him up, he was not there. I asked another parent – she had not seen him, but told me where her kids were.

Since my child is always in search of food, I thought it was quite possible he had been scrounging for a rogue granola bar or leftover Halloween candy.

I found his bookbag outside my office, so I took it to my car before going off to find him.

“I better go back through the building; he may be looking for me,” I thought.

I got to where I thought he would be and where he should be; only, he wasn’t there.

I took a deep breath.

Surely he was in the building somewhere, I just didn’t see him yet.

I walked around the top floor looking for him. Nowhere.

On the lower level, I found one of his friends and asked her if she knew where he was.

He had told her he was going where I was the last time she saw him.

And that was when he told me he was going with them.

Anger was the new emotion coursing through my body.

Had he lied to me?

I made my way through the building in a frenzied pace, hoping I would find him.

He was nowhere.

I headed back to another building to see if he was there, anger, fear, anxiety and worry brewing.

My heart was in my throat; was he OK? where was he?

And again…had my child lied? If so, why?

I thought I caught a glimpse of him as I walked back up the hill and called his name.

No response.
Was it not him?

I kept waiting for him to catch sight of me and come running but nothing.

The few yards I had to walk seemed to take an eternity until I got up to the building and finally saw him coming around the other side.

“There you are,” he said, “I have been looking for you.”

I was immediately relieved, grateful and wanted to sob I was so happy to see him. But, in true fashion, I did what all the women in my family do when scared out of our wits.

I yelled at him. Or more accurately, screamed. Irish banshee, soul rendering screams.

All the way home.

I am not even sure what I said, other than, “Where were you and what were you thinking?”

I am sure it was much worse than that because I was in an anxiety fever fit.

I had been looking for him for 20 minutes and every imaginable horror that could happen to my child had raced through my mind.

When I saw he was safe and sound, I unleashed locusts on his little mop top self.

After we got home, I continued my rant.

“You just need to calm down,” Lamar said.

Even though I have no empirical evidence to support this claim, I am pretty sure saying that to a hysterical woman has only proved to worsen the situation.

I texted Mama to let her know I was home, because even though I am nearly 46 years old, she wants to know I am safe. Wanting to know your child’s whereabouts, no matter how old and grown they were, was never more tacit than at this moment.

“Home –too exhausted and upset to talk. Talk later.”

“What’s wrong? Are you OK?” was her immediate response.

“Just really upset and don’t want to rehash.”

So she did what any mother would do – even this mama.

She called.

“What’s wrong?” she repeated her question.

I briefed her on the events of the last 40 minutes.

“Bottom line, if he had just been where I told him to be – which was with me – to begin with, this would not have happened. I have let him have too much freedom.”

She was quiet. Unusually quiet. Normally, Mama is the one who defends Cole, her only grandchild, no matter what and things that would have gotten me whoopings for days, she waves away and tells me to let it slide.

This time, she wasn’t so quick to defend.

“Put Cole on the phone,” she said sternly.

I handed him the phone.

He quietly talked to his grandmother for 15 minutes before handing the phone back to me.

“We have discussed what happened,” Mama began. “It was a matter of miscommunication, but, we came up with some ways to avoid it in the future.”

“There won’t be any future incidents,” I said. I was being irrational I know, but I was still shaking.

“You can’t do that, Kitten,” she said quietly. “You can’t do that with him, no more than I could do that with you when you were his age. He is a good kid. Remember that. A good kid. But still a kid. And sometimes, you have to give him chances, even if it means he messes up.”

“How are you so calm about this?” I asked.

“Because,” she began, “I know how that feels. Oh, how I know that feels. It’s an awful feeling. But, he thought you heard him tell you where he was going and you didn’t. It was, as I said before, just a miscommunication. That’s all.”

Mama did something Granny in all of her infinite, omnipotent power and wisdom had never been able to do.